Life's Pleasures Quote by Jean Kerr

Kerr’s joke lands because it pretends to mourn an innovation the world absolutely does not need: a sustainable career built on intoxication. The line is constructed like a sober business memo - “a number of people have tried,” “no one has ever found a way” - but the subject is gloriously unserious. That mismatch is the engine. She gives the professional striver’s language to the amateur hedonist, turning “drinking” into a failed startup category: lots of hustle, no viable model.

The intent isn’t temperance, exactly. It’s a wry acknowledgment of a mid-century fantasy: that pleasure could be made consequence-free if only someone could monetize it. Kerr punctures the romantic myth of the hard-drinking genius by treating it as a logistical problem. If drinking were truly “for a living,” it would have to pay rent, fund healthcare, and show up reliably on Monday. The joke quietly insists that alcohol’s real cost is the thing you can’t expense.

As a playwright and humorist, Kerr writes with an ear for social performance. “A number of people” gestures at the familiar cast: the cocktail-party wit, the office lush, the bohemian who thinks self-destruction reads as sophistication. The subtext is gendered and domestic, too: in Kerr’s era, drinking was a public badge for men and a private mess for everyone else, often absorbed by households that had to keep functioning. Her punchline is a deadpan refusal to glamourize the spillover. Drinking can feel like a vocation; Kerr reminds you it’s a hobby that invoices your future.